Sewage spill at Ranleigh Crescent home

IAN and Anette Barnard returned from a business trip thinking they could finally take a breather. But their relief soon turned to horror when they found that their entire yard had been flooded, with sewage.

Offals of a slaughtered cow were later found to have caused the blockage that resulted in the spillage that has ruined the Durban North couple’s yard. The Barnards had returned to their Ranleigh Crescent home on Tuesday 1 April and realised that they were in for a massive clean-up operation. It marked the third time that the yard had been flooded since it was occupied in the 1970’s.

“The previous time our property flooded, our back and front walls collapsed. Our house is lower lying than our neighbours’ homes and it would seem as if that’s one of the reasons our house gets flooded when there are flash floods, like the one on Tuesday,” Ian said.

Since the back wall collapsed the last time, Barnards’ neighbours have built a new wall with weeping holes to prevent the water from building up on the neighbour’s higher laying property.
They geared themselves up for the clean-up that lay ahead the next day, only to wake up to a horrible stench the next morning.

“I woke up to a horrible odour on Wednesday morning. When I got up to investigate I found that sewage had been seeping through the neighbour’s weeping holes in his wall. Our whole backyard, storeroom and pool was full of sewage,” Anette said.

The Barnards then contacted eThekwini Municipality’s health department who started the cleaning operation on Thursday 3 April.

“One of the municipal workers climbed over our neighbour’s wall to see where the sewage was coming from.
There they found that a sewerage manhole had lifted and sewage was bubbling out the top. He told me the system was blocked by what appeared to be a cow’s stomach and intestines. When he tried to remove it from the system, he lifted it just enough for the stomach and intestines to slip through the system and make its way further down the pipes,” Anette added.

The Barnards are livid: “Our neighbours have done what they could by building a new wall with weeping holes, but it’s only taking care of the problem on their property and preventing the wall from collapsing again. It’s not doing anything for the problems we have to face during a heavy downpour.

“The municipal workers on site reckoned the municipality must investigate the condition of the existing sewerage pipes and upgrade the infrastructure. The same goes for the storm water drains and pipes. Broadway has developed into a bustling business district, with more people than ever, but the water and sewerage infrastructure remained the same,” Ian added.

They said a possible solution to their constant flooding problem could be for the municipality to build a trench to direct water away from their home.

“We want the municipality to sort out the problem permanently. The city engineers need to look at the current infrastructure and fix it. It’s simple, we need bigger pipes,” he said.

eThekwini Municipality’s health department cleaned up their property, storeroom and drained their pool. “We love camping, but we’ll have to buy a whole lot of new camping goods as we stored all our camping gear in the storeroom.”

“I agree that this area could be prone to flooding during extreme weather and obviously the draining system is not designed to handle such.

“What I have asked is for a municipal engineer to determine the reason why this happens and what solutions are available including increasing capacity around storm water disposal to avoid disasters in the future,” said local councillor, Dean Macpherson.

eThekwini Municipality did not respond at the time of going to print.